Posts tagged “moonrise”

It has been a while since I posted. I wish I could tell you that it is because I’ve been so busy going out doing photography, but that is not the case. House projects seem to be taking up my whole summer. But I did get out last Tuesday night with some friends to photograph the full moon rising over Mount Rainier. After seeing on the Photographer’s Ephemeris that the full moon would rise behind Rainier as seen from the Fox Island Bridge, I’d planned this shot for a month. As the day progressed, I occasionally checked the weather, and it looked good. That is, until close to sunset, when high clouds started coming in. And unfortunately, just as the sun was setting and the moon rising, there were high clouds immediately above the mountain. The moon was obscured almost as soon as it rose.

The photo above is about as good as it got, and this image took some Photoshop work to bring out the top of the moon. Not bad, but not what I had imagined I would get. No matter how long you plan, Mother Nature’s plans sometimes trumps yours.

Like this:

As I mentioned in my last post, I drove up to Seattle a week ago Friday on a photo day. I captured some great images; but the trip almost didn’t happen.

First, before the story, a mini-rant – I hate the weather. I, like most photographers who shoot outdoors, am obsessed with the weather. The weather is never perfect – it’s either too cloudy, or not enough clouds, or too sunny, or too gray, etc. etc. For my Friday trip, I wasn’t looking for perfect weather. Rather if I was taking a day off from work to go take photos, I didn’t want to waste my time if the weather wasn’t going to be good enough to offer at least a few decent shots. Rant’s over, now on to the story.

On Thursday night, I checked the weather forecast to see what was in store. The forecast for Seattle was cloudy with a 70% chance of rain both in morning and afternoon – yuck! I thought about going to eastern Washington (which often has better weather), and the forecast for Yakima was cloudy with a 30% chance of freezing rain – not much better. I decided to stay home, work on the computer, and if it looked like the clouds might break, to run up to Seattle.

When I got up Friday morning, it was cloudy, but not rainy. As the morning wore on, there were breaks in the clouds, and I could see a bit of blue sky. So at noon, Tanya, Carson and I headed to Seattle. We went to the Great Wheel, Elliot Bay Park, and West Seattle. It was fairly cloudy when we arrived in Seattle, but as the afternoon wore on it got sunny and warm. By late afternoon, there were scattered clouds both to the east and west of the city, the city itself was under blue skies. It was near perfect weather for photography!

One of the shots I wanted was the moonrise over the city. This was the day before the full moon, and using the Photographers Emphemeris I knew the moon would rise about an hour before sunset directly over the city as viewed from West Seattle. This situation only happens a couple of times each year and those are always in winter. We drove to West Seattle, getting there about 1.5 hours before sunset. However, the few clouds that were left east of Seattle looked like they would block the rising moon.

I was able to get some nice, colorful late afternoon shots of the city skyline. Time for the moonrise came and went, and we couldn’t see the moon. Then Tanya helped me shoot a short video for my Kickstarter project (concerning my Seattle ebook I’ve talked about previously). We took a couple takes, when Tanya said “wow, look at that moon!” (my back was toward the city view). I turned around, and wow was right. I quickly grabbed the camera, switch to still photo mode, put on the 70-200 lens and shot away. I think you’ll agree, the results (featured above) were good.

So what I had thought was going to be a bad weather day for photography, turned out being perfect. Goes to show, you can never trust those weather reports.

Downtown Seattle prior to sunset, looking like the moon would not be visible.